We still hope, but our dreams are not the same (OTA)

[takethatnature]

Who: Wilson P. Higgsbury and you!
What: December catchall
When: Both during and after the excursion
Where: Around the ship
Warnings: Body horror in prompt 2

1. Healed, or are you still just reeling? (Sundries)

Wilson's received a small package wrapped in fishscale-print paper. He tears the gift wrap open immediately and pulls out his prize: a feather duster with dried flower petals instead of feathers.

"Oh, it's Wanda's little redecorate-y thing!" He waves it at a straw hat hanging on a display, and with a poof of smoke, it's now shaped like a cowboy hat. Drops his ice staff on the floor and waves the Clean Sweeper at that, and presto, the handle now has red wrappings and bands of golden metal. His Tam O' Shanter becomes green with decorative tufts of red feathers. What else can he try it on? Of course! He swings it at his own face, and his beard takes on a jagged angular shape and develops a white streak at the chin.

2. Are you fine, have you found a way to escape?

It's not until the next morning that the memories creep in. Wilson and four others were there at the Ancient Gateway when Wickerbottom turned it on, Wigfrid threw herself headfirst into the portal as it activated, and that's how they all got pulled into a gladiatorial arena that appeared to be inside a volcano. The Forge. Run by a man who refused to believe they were anything other than the Nightmare Throne's 'Gatekeepers'. He'd thrown every creature at his disposal into it, trying to kill them, and he'd almost succeeded. The flower-summoning staff Wilson picked up had closed the survivors' wounds, but the sensation of being flung across the room by a backhand from a Deerclops-sized pigman is fresh in his mind even without any bruises to show for it.

And when Battlemaster Pugna ran out of troops and agreed to activate the portal for them, not only did it not send them home, it didn't even return them to the Constant. Three of the survivors - who knew where out of all the possible worlds Wolfgang, Wigfrid, and Willow had been sent - were ejected into the center of a run-down seaside town with a thickly overcast sky and an ever-hungry mouth with concentric rings of teeth hovering above. The Gnaw. It hadn't been interested in the locals' cooking after the three of them arrived, so they'd had to do it themselves. And fast, or else the scaly plague that seemed to afflict almost all the longtime residents would be the Gnaw's punishment for delaying its meal.

But they'd escaped unscathed, using the tokens they collected from pleasing the Gnaw to reopen the portal. Right? When did that happen, was it before the tidal wave that brought him here - even though they'd had every intention of bringing the locals to safety with them, and yet he'd never seen them again in the Constant - or had he been sent back for it? Did he really come out of it unscathed? In the days that follow, Wilson can often be seen examining himself in the mirrors and reflective surfaces of the ship, looking too concerned for it to be vanity. He's checking for fins and fish scales.

"Am I turning into a frog?" he'll ask, if he catches you staring.

3. Are you here just because I need you? (Library)

Eventually he talked Maxwell into handing over the Living Logs, and together with a purple gem and some of his stash of Nightmare Fuel, another strange structure goes up near the Alchemy Engine in the library. It floats above the ground, climbing higher when people get near it.

4. Can we hole up? A big freeze is coming our way (During the excursion)

The carnivorous piano is hungry, and possibly bored, without Phil around to play it and slip it a morsel between songs. It's started wandering out of John's to prowl the ship again. Wilson spots it from the other end of the atrium, whips out a sketchpad, and starts hastily whipping up some sheet music (for "the Starvers' Carol", if you look closely). Once he's finished, he waves the sheaf of paper at the piano. It licks its chops.

There's a sound of piano keys slamming and a startled trumpet-like shriek. Wilson's ended up on top of the piano, reflexively holding tight to the sheet music, while it runs in circles and chews on the other end of the paper.

5. We're on a hiding to nowhere

Wildcard!

Comments

2

[knotawolf]

Yufei gets way too close to Wilson, sniffing at him. Once satisfied he pulls back, tilting his head at him curiously.

"No. Are not a frog. Why? Should be a frog?"

[takethatnature]

"Personal space!" Wilson yells, flailing at Yufei's intruding face and trying to back up.

"No, I'm not supposed to be a frog. That's why I asked!" He folds his arms. "Would I smell different if I was turning into a frog?"

[knotawolf]

He squats down on his haunches, unsure what personal space is but at least he's not sniffing him anymore.

"If you are supposed to be a frog, yes. If this is you and are going to be a frog instead, no." He considers Demona and Nimona who both smelled the same when in their other forms, but that might be because they were shapeshifters to begin with. No wait, Demona said she was cursed so that's different.

"Why do you want to be a frog? Water here is wrong for that. Are waves and salt."

[takethatnature]

Many of our sick disappeared into the sea. Odd, that, Pipton had told him. The grocer was something of a best-case scenario with regards to the Gnaw's plague, having kept both his mental faculties and his moustache after the transformation.

"I don't want to be a frog. Or a frog-person. But I almost got turned into one anyway, and I'm not sure if it's been long enough to stop worrying that it's just in the incubation period."

[knotawolf]

"Oh. Yes, having wrong body is not good. Most of the time." Sometimes it's a change for the better, it just takes a while to realize that.

"Were you cursed? To fix a curse you need to find items and then burn them."

[takethatnature]

"That's for sure," Wilson says, not solely thinking about species as he does. Although the Gnaw's plague is worse; you can't HRT (Human Replacement Therapy) your way out of a merm transformation.

Or can you? It's not as if anyone in the Elder Bog had the facilities to try it.

He shakes his head and waves his arms across each other to emphasize. "No, burning stuff just made it worse. Stars above, that grill was touchy."

"I would characterise it as a disease, not a curse, but I have heard it described that way," Wilson says, clinging to scientific interpretations by his figurative fingernails. "There was a giant sky-mouth-god-wyrm-thing and we had to cook food for it or else it would infect us."

[knotawolf]

"Then aren't burning them right. Have seen it work." He snorts, he knows what he's talking about when it comes to curses.

"Sky serpent captured you? And didn't eat you instead?" Okay that's weird, that's not like any sky serpent he's ever encountered. "And it was going to turn you into frog. That is not right, should have turned you into clouds."

[takethatnature]

"You sound like Willow," Wilson grumbles. "'If burning it doesn't work, just burn it better.'"

"For your information, we couldn't get anything up high enough to affect the Gnaw except by convincing it to slurp it into its mouth off the altar, and it did not like burnt food."

Possibly they could have built some sort of balloon or rocket if they'd had more time or more people, especially if Wes or Wheeler had been able to lend their balloon-related talents. But there just wasn't time in between cooking the food and growing the ingredients and keeping the cooking fires burning. The three of them were run ragged.

"I did wonder what would happen if I climbed onto the altar. It didn't show an interest in eating anything that wasn't placed there for it." Wilson was as much the target of Wickerbottom's 'whatever you do, don't throw yourself onto the Altar of Gnaw' cautions as ten-year-old Wendy. It's not as if he would have gone through with it. Without a resurrection or teleportation method lined up, at least.

"Well, it must have been a weird sky serpent. I didn't hear about anyone getting turned into clouds, but almost all the goat people and some of the pig people who used to live in the town got infected with the plague and started turning amphibious."

[knotawolf]

"Because I am right." more than a little exasperated he continues, "Not to feed to sky snake! You burn things to remove curses. But people do it wrong, it is the smoke that matters not the fire, need to breathe the smoke, not toss things and run away."

He apparently has opinions on people who drive out to the forest to preform rituals that they think no one will see.

"What does a water goat look like?"

[takethatnature]

Wilson makes a face instead of answering right away, because one of them doesn't know what they're talking about and he doesn't want it to be him but he doesn't have a good argument to prove that it's this guy. And the other guy sure sounds like he's got experience with the subject.

"It can't be as easy as you make it sound," he finally says. "They'd been dealing with the Gnaw for at least thirty years. Someone would have tried that already, wouldn't they?"

He tries to banish the thought that someone must also have already tried blowing the Gnaw up, and probably suffered terribly for their failure.

"Well, she had an upright posture like a human, but taller than anyone I've met unless Maxwell's preposterously gangly Nightmare Throne projection counts. Her fur was green, but that might be natural, since her son was blue and he seemed fine, and she had scales on her limbs and lower body."

[knotawolf]

He just learned the concept of days and weeks recently, years is a little beyond him. He assumes they tried to burn things 30 times.

"Green fur is different. Have not seen that. Or with scales. What forest are you from?"

[takethatnature]

"Oh, I was just visiting. I don't suppose you've heard of 'the Elder Bog'?" He's been to a lot of cursed forests. "Also known as the Gorge or the Quagmire?"

[knotawolf]

"Quagmire! Yes. Is where swimming dinosaur monster lives." Which might be similar if there's a smaller loch ness monster in Wilson's world.

"If you turn into a frog want me to kill you so you come back as human?" said conversationally like he's offering to help him move a couch.

[takethatnature]

"I didn't see any swimming dinosaur monsters," Wilson says, mentally reviewing the wildlife he'd observed (it's a short list, mainly feral pigeons and rabbits). It's not as if he'd gone out and surveyed the ocean when he was there, so he's not ruling it out, but if the waters around the town had a cold-water Quacken or an aquatic Pugalisk or a really big merm lurking in the depths, it stayed down there for the duration and nobody brought it up. "Is it shy?"

He furrows his eyebrows, giving the offer genuine consideration. "Maybe. If I transformed completely, I think I'd rather deal with a resurrection penalty than stay that way. The concerning part is that I don't know if that would work. I could end up with both problems at once when I revive."

[knotawolf]

"Very. It does not want to be spotted."

He agrees, he wouldn't want to be a frog very much. "Okay. If you just get scales and skin might not be so bad. Could breathe underwater, and there is very much water around."